Category: Entertainment

Twin brothers Larry and Kelly Ganges grew up outside of Trenton with people constantly mispronouncing their last name. “Grange, Grain, Ganger,” they’ve heard it all.

So they developed a standard reply: “It’s Ganges like the river [in India].”

Decades on, they’d find out the deep Philadelphia story behind it.

When the brothers, now 72, got older and traveled, they’d grab the phone book in whatever town they were in to see if anybody with their last name was listed. Then they’d call and ask if they knew anybody in their family; they often did.

“So we all thought, no matter where we were,” said Larry, “we were connected with somebody,”

But they were also connected with something — a ship, a travesty, and a providence.

The brothers’ first clue of their extended heritage arrived in 1975, when Kelly, was a student at Trenton State College. His journalism teacher, familiar with Bucks County cemeteries, asked if Kelly knew about the gravestones of two soldiers buried there.

Torbert and William Ganges had fought in the Civil War’s colored regiment, but Kelly couldn’t be sure if they were his relatives.

Nearly 30 years later, the brothers still don’t know if they are related to the soldiers, but they have discovered that their heritage is, as Kelly describes, “bigger than us, [it] extends beyond the continental United States and involves potentially the world.”

That information came in a phone call.

In the early aughts, Larry was working as the New Jersey Department of Health’s assistant commissioner for the HIV/AIDS division. His secretary told him that David Barnes, a University of Pennsylvania professor of history and the sociology of science, was on the line to talk about a different epidemic.

Barnes, who was seeking anyone with the Ganges name, had found Larry by chance in a New Jersey state employees directory. He wanted to discuss the 135 Africans who arrived in Philadelphia in 1800 and were detained at the old Lazaretto along the Delaware River.

At the time, every vessel arriving in Philadelphia was required to stop and be inspected at the Lazaretto — a hospital and quarantine station — where patients with yellow fever were treated.

Later, a brick facility replaced the old Lazaretto. Downriver from the original, the “new” Lazaretto, operational from 1801-1895, stands near present day Tinicum. It is the oldest surviving quarantine station in the Western Hemisphere and one of the 10 oldest in the world.

By the call’s end, Larry had learned not just the origin of his name but how his ancestors arrived in America.

“Wow, we had never heard about it. We just didn’t know,” he said.

The story goes: In 1800, the United States naval ship Ganges intercepted two schooners (the Phoebe and the Prudence) off the coast of Florida, near Cuba. Despite a new federal law banning the carrying of human beings for enslavement, the schooners, which experts believe disembarked from near Sierra Leone, contained 135 people from Africa, imprisoned as slaves, bound for the New World.

Ganges’ naval officers boarded the schooners — the Phoebe on July 19, 1800, and the Prudence on July 21, 1800 — took the enslaved into custody, and delivered them to the Ganges’ home port: Philadelphia.

When the schooners’ owners sued to reclaim their “property,” a Philadelphia judge ruled that the 135 aboard were people (not property) and ordered them freed. The Africans were remanded to the old Lazaretto for quarantine where they remained for up to three months.

Subsequently Sambo, Milnor, Yelle, and Culico Ganges and the rest of the 123 survivors were indentured to Pennsylvania Abolition Society members and others.

After Barnes’ phone call, the twins and their (late) older brother, Tendaji Ganges, visited the Lazaretto. At that time, the dilapidated building was locked. But Kelly returned with Barnes and gained access inside.

“I saw all of the little rooms … it was interesting to touch a piece of history, and know that that’s the genesis of how our family came to the United States,” he said.

“These modern-day heirs carry the legacy of resistance and survival into today’s conversations around justice, identity, and belonging,” said filmmaker Rah Crawford, whose documentary The Art of Brotherly Love focuses on the Ganges’ story.

When the film premiered in Brooklyn last year, Larry said that as he sat in the audience watching, he was shaking, almost in tears. His wife asked, “Are you OK? Are you cold?”

He was overcome with emotions: “I was sad, I was happy, I was mad.”

Although, as the brothers say, “we’ve got the generic connection to the name,” they don’t have a connection to identify individual family members that came through the old Lazaretto; they can’t yet determine how their bloodline was carried to them.

But thanks to the efforts of family historian Michael Kearney, who is tracking descendants of the Ganges’ survivors, Larry is confident that “my children and my children’s children [are going] to know what the story is, and to know how to access it, and know who the players are …. And hopefully this movie is not the last of what’s going to occur.”

Despite federal efforts to mute the history of enslavement in America — history panels at the President’s House referencing the Ganges story were removed from the site last month — the Ganges brothers know it’s important to share their story.

“People made it through the troubled journey, the Middle Passage, and landed on American soil and contributed to make America a great nation,” said Kelly, “And nobody can ever deny that, and people can try and whitewash it and try to erase it, but it’s not going to work, because it’s real. Our contribution is documented.”

Prior to the opening of the President’s House in 2010, filmmaker Crawford was commissioned to create storyboards for a video installation at the site. Through his research, he first learned of the Ganges’ story, launching a 15-plus-year journey to produce the documentary.

The Art of Brotherly Love, presented in partnership with Creative Philadelphia, is both a documentary and a trailer for a forthcoming animated feature. The Philadelphia premiere is slated for Feb. 14 at Ritz Five.

After the documentary screens, Kelly Ganges hopes that, “it just continues to cascade out — to inspire more genealogists and historians, and to reach more descendants and the next generation.”

“The Art of Brotherly Love,” Feb. 14, 11:30 a.m., Landmark’s Ritz Five, 214 Walnut St., eventbrite.com